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Atlanta Summit, Day 3: Learning from the Community

The theme of the OpenStack Summit today is centered on learning, education, and development. Attendees are flocking to the “how to” panels — from “Scaling Out OpenStack Clouds in the Enterprise” to the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to DevOps Tools on OpenStack.” Sessions focused on OpenStack use cases are garnering a good deal of attention as well, including stories from users at Georgia Tech University, Time Warner Cable, Van Budd Lines, RGB Networks, Seagate and more.

It’s manifestly obvious that the OpenStack community is hungry to learn from the successes and failures of others in order to better adopt, deploy, or manage an OpenStack cloud. There are common problems across a number of OpenStack users — including storing very large amounts of data, controlling costs, and scaling quickly and reliably — that the community is coming together to solve.

The business use of OpenStack was a topic of discussion as well. In a panel with Matt Haines from Time Warner Cable, Andy Salo from RGB Networks, and Doug Soltesz from Budd Van Lines, questions were brought up around how to convince decisions makers to choose OpenStack, how to calculate TCO when running Openstack, and why support will always be a critical element of any OpenStack strategy for enterprises.

When an audience member asked about how to look at OpenStack from an ROI point of view, Soltesz explained that for some enterprises, it’s difficult to argue for something as critical as disaster recovery from a revenue standpoint. “We’re a trucking company,” Soltesz said. “If I spend $100,000 on a solution, I just took one truck off the road, and that truck is a revenue generator.”But for him, and for many others trying to convince their CEOs and Boards to adopt OpenStack, the cost involved is one of many factors in adopting OpenStack. Fundamentally, “it’s gotta work,” he said.

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Summit selfies. They’re a thing. Check out the Twitter feed here and tag your own selfies with the #SummitSelfie hashtag.